I did one of these back in 2000 (my god, has it been that long ??). It worked fine, but I wasn't that happy with how it hooked up to the PC: It was kind of klonky and ugly, so I re-did the whole thing, condensing everything into just the Button Box (with hand buzzers, of course). I have an I-PAC VE inside of the Button Box itself now, so everything connects to the PC via a single USB cable.
Much cleaner now.
Here's the Button Box that has all of the "answer" keys. The hand buzzers plug into the jacks toward the bottom.
The hand buzzers are actually made out of 1/2" PVC.
There's a SPST momentary pushbutton mounted to the top endcap, which is wired to a two-conductor 1/8" mini phone jack cord.
Everything connects to the PC with a single USB cable, which is connected to an
I-PAC VE keyboard encoder that's inside the Button Box.
And here's everything together. Bonus shot of my dog's butt in the upper right of the picture.
Just wanted to see what y'all thought. Feel free to use this thread to reminisce about how cool YDKJ is if you wanna too.
Project website:
http://www.arcadeparadise.org/console/ydkj2/